


Uncanny Valley

by Anthy_FalloutGirl (Anatheia)



Category: Fallout 4
Genre: Gen, No Smut, just feels, sorry - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-16
Updated: 2016-08-16
Packaged: 2018-08-09 03:09:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 709
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7784344
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anatheia/pseuds/Anthy_FalloutGirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>How dare they have her friend's face.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Uncanny Valley

He was the first 'Synth' she'd ever met.   
She didn't rightly know what they were, until she'd met him. No one had told her to expect a robotic man when she'd gone into the Park Street Station Vault. But he had a gentle voice, a little raspy, and oddly, he smoked.   
She felt an immediate attraction to the hard-boiled Detective.   
It wasn't sexual in the slightest.   
It was just that Nick Valentine reminded her of something deeply familiar, and it comforted her. She could relax with Nick around. Not only was he intelligent, but kind and thoughtful too.   
Deeply empathic, even.   
He never slept, so he didn't mind sitting watch beside Dogmeat while she slept. Sometimes, she would cry in her sleep, only to rouse a little when someone gently smoothed her hair off her face. Despite the synthetic nature of his 'skin', or the chilled temperature, it somehow felt like her father's hand when she was a girl.   
Her father had been killed by communist terrorists, bombing his precinct down in Quincy. She'd been orphaned that day, and though she was a young women of twenty when he died, she'd still felt like a lost child at the time.   
Nick was very much like her father.

It was part of the reason she hated the other ones.   
The ones that spoke with awful robot voices.   
They didn't move the way that Nick did; smoothly, with the gait of a confident and relaxed man. Their steps were jerkier, sharper. She'd heard of the 'Uncanny Valley'; the place where we recognized something as being 'innately inhuman' despite appearing to be so. Nick did not bring that unpleasant sensation to mind, but the Gen 1s and Gen 2s certainly did.   
But the thing she hated the most about them was their faces, and their eyes.

They had never changed the 'face' of the Synths, after creating Nick Valentine.   
They all had the same face as her dear detective friend, but they tumbled deeply into that uncanny valley for her. Their faces lacked his warmth, his personality.   
Like an army of shambling dead detectives, with cold machine voices and empty glowing eyes.  
Nick's eyes were warm. Kind. They could reassure her with just a glance, his small half smile making her smile back. The torn and missing pieces of his outer 'skin' were just scars and battle wounds, common in an old soldier. They told a story; a sad and lonely tale, revealed only in flashbacks.   
It was the face of Nick Valentine, the Wasteland's only Detective.   
And oh, how she loved that careworn old face.

And how dare those awful jerking puppets have her friend's face.   
How dare they make his kind smile empty and cold. She hated them for that, for making her see what Nick would look like without 'Nick' inside him.   
Empty.   
Cold.   
Somehow cruel and uncaring; everything in the world that Nick Valentine was not.  
How dare they.

She came to her senses suddenly, and looked up at his face. She knew immediately it was him, and not one of them, because he looked worried about her. His hand, just metal and wires now, gripped her shoulder.  
"You okay?"   
His voice, his wonderful voice. At least that they could not take from her; this was Nick's voice, and only his.  
"I...yeah. I just...does it...bother you? That they...they look like you?"   
Even saying it aloud made a lump form in her throat. He looked sad, and sighed a little.  
"Like a mirror from a nightmare. But it makes me...a little sad, too. How many times did they try? To make something like me?" He looked at her, his golden eyes sad.  
"You're the only thing that I can thank the Institute for...you're the finest thing they ever created...and they were stupid enough to throw you out with the trash. It's their loss, and my gain."   
She spoke firmly, and he looked surprised, and then smiled at her.  
"Well, that's a compliment I'll take, kid."   
He caught the back of her neck, ruffling her hair. It made her smile, and she felt better.   
When she looked down at that broken, shattered face on the ground, she didn't see her friend's face anymore.

**Author's Note:**

> It always bugs me that Synths all had the same Face model as Nick; His is obviously more damaged (and more animated) but that clear resemblance just made me hate them a little bit more.


End file.
